Testing the Hub's Limits: A Look Back at Rampant Inappropriateness

Updated on October 8, 2010

Okay, that title's an exaggeration.

(If you've been keeping an eye on my progress lately, you will have noticed a recent explosion of hubtivity, if you will. In the span of just two weeks or so last month, I nearly doubled my amount of hubs, and I'm shooting for more this month.

Since I have made it to what I feel is a landmark number of hubs, I think it's worth a look back on how I got here and the things I tried along the way.)

Testing the Limits

This past couple of weeks has, in some ways, involved my "testing the limits," so to speak, of what I could get away with while still being advertiser-friendly, if you haven't noticed. I wanted to see if the well-known fact of "Gasp, you can't say 'sex' on the Internet!" really holds water, so I purposefully put out some hubs that were borderline (nothing even close to adult material, I assure you), to see what would happen.

Here's what happened: At first, the former article required some revision to get over Hubpages' filters, which was reasonable. I removed some phrases and such that triggered them, and toned down the article slightly until it passed. However, once the article was published, it was Google herself who would not display any ads. Quite interesting.

The second hub, I actually thought was quite heartfelt, and really didn't have any kind of offensive material besides saying "sex" a lot. It passed the filters initially, but then had the ads disabled by a moderator. I nodded, had a good laugh, and disabled the ads myself so the annoying warning would stop appearing.

Unexpectedly, though, two more hubs happened to follow the same fate of these first two: My article on how to hide ones smut became spontaneously adless, kind of like my porn article; and my article on gross things that women wear also oddly was flagged and the ads were disabled by a moderator. This last one sort of puzzles me because, as far as I see, there's nothing inappropriate in it (though it was also featured on the front page, which was pretty awesome in spite of everything).

I spy with my little eye...a fig leaf. | Source

Traffic

Another reason I published those hubs was to see if such material would get more traffic than my other, overwhelmingly "appropriate" articles. What generally would happen, though, was that the article would initially indeed get an unusual amount of traffic for a newly-published hub, but then it would drop quickly (with the exception of the "5 Gross Things Women Wear" hub, which wasn't really inappropriate at all, though). I'm not sure why this is. I also noticed that such material has a tendency to get voted down briefly before making the usual trek up the ranks in terms of hubscore.

All of these hubs now bear solely Amazon.com capsules, which is generally less lucrative, but I still think it was totally worth it for what I learned.

Also, it confirmed for me the truth of that statement: You can't say 'sex' on the Internet. Or at least not a lot, unless you're okay with your ads getting disabled. (Hahaha...)

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